AN OPPORTUNITY TO OWN SOMETHING YOUR COMPETITORS CANNOT

The Brief

What started as a direct mail campaign to a niche number of prospects in retail and manufacturing developed into a 9-month strategy to enrich IRI’s marketing programme and build the 2020 strategy.

The Response

We kickstarted the relationship with a couple of workshops to get to the route of the business and work on tone of voice. From there we were able to shape the messaging for the pilot direct mail campaign.

IRI’s offering is complex and difficult to explain succinctly. This is a company that takes big data from multiple sources and distils it into valuable insights and more importantly, predictive analytics. Central to our DM became the notion of ‘making the complex simple’.

Our idea was a ‘book’, entitled; ‘How to Win with Data and Influence People’. It is a playful, humourous take on the world -famous self-help book, yet still adhering to the IRI brand guidelines, and ultimately still resonating with the underlying message and call to action.

The book is in fact a box that holds a brochure on a raised plinth, and an ‘IRI Illuminator’ on the inside cover.

IRI is a market research company headquartered in the U.S. which provides clients with consumer, shopper, and retail market intelligence and analysis focused on the consumer packaged goods (CPG) industry.

The brochure front cover has the campaign strapline ‘Simplify the complex’ printed on the front, but it is obscured by geometrical cubes made up of lots of small red dots, representing the vastness of data. Within the brochure, certain pages have text obscured by similar explosions of red data dots.

The only way to read the text is to use the IRI Illuminator; a spy glass that effectively blocks out red print, being made with red acetate. Holding it up to the text magically makes the red data disappear, revealing a pertinent piece of insight underneath.

The Results

We sent 5 different versions of the brochures, tailored to Retail and Manufacturing. Our telemarketing team managed the follow up and we smashed all targets! The campaign generated an impressive 23 qualified leads from 300 contacts (8%). There was over 90% recall of the campaign and some contacts went so far as to contact the senior leadership team on LinkedIn to congratulate them on getting their attention!

Having proved our mettle, we supported IRI on various projects throughout 2019 including client proposals, videos, loyalty programmes and collateral. This gave us plenty of knowledge to build out their 2020 strategy plans and rigorously champion a much closer partnership between sales, marketing and PR and across the European markets.